So turns out PVP is actually quite popular in wow (Blizzard Official Statistics).

[Kazdum]

The numbers showed me exactly what I already knew - WoW PvP is alive and popular and the naysayers will ALWAYS find something to be negative about.

670,000 times a day people choose to do something they enjoy. Nothing else to say really.

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

[Crruor]

True, you have a lot of 2-5 min arenas in that statistic, and 2 hour raids or dungeons (blackrock).


But you also, probably, have people running stratholme for the mount in 3 minutes 5 times per hour, or stonecore/utgarde/setekh daily for the mounts. Add the fact that most people (assuming) lvl by duing lfd and you have a whole different picture.

[Raiju]

True, you have a lot of 2-5 min arenas in that statistic, and 2 hour raids or dungeons (blackrock).


But you also, probably, have people running stratholme for the mount in 3 minutes 5 times per hour, or stonecore/utgarde/setekh daily for the mounts. Add the fact that most people (assuming) lvl by duing lfd and you have a whole different picture.

People mount farming will be an insignificant amount, and even low level dungeons on average take longer than an arena match (I'd say 2-3x as long given arena matches rarely last 4 minutes at average rating)

BG's tend to take longer than dungeons, but significantly shorter than raids or even LFR

I think arguing PvP is 29% and PvE 69% (last 2% for whatever other exceptions) would be fairly realistic, but I'm sure in the PvP section I'm going to see people comparing an AV resources victory to a scenario.

[Yimereh]

An unknown statistic is the Percentage of PvE & PvP instances that are being botted. Of course PvP seems to have more bot representation at max level but at the lower levels Questing/Dungeon botting is far more popular. I understand that most people are anti-social in random dungeons but when leveling nowadays I have encountered many automated dungeon grinders. This doesn't even account for the amount of individual botters who chain run certain dungeons for profitability. If you remember not very long ago the corpse piles on PvP servers at the Halls of lightning entrance you will understand what I'm talking about.

Botting has reached every corner of WoW and the amount it accounts for in these statistics is unknown. I however fully believe that PvE is more popular because of its nature. People would much rather fight against a more static AI than a dynamic player. I mean a new player can jump into LFR and proving grounds and timeless Isle and have a very forgiving PvE experience. PvP is a very unforgiving environment, there is no beginner section. If you don't understand your class dynamic in PvP you are doomed to get your ass handed to you repetitively, in PvE you get a determination buff.

[Korgoth]

I'd be more interested in them releasing just the instance number for end game. Leveling an alt I do hundreds of PVE instances, and 1 PvP instance where I realize its completely retarded and a waste of time.

Remove the low level pve instances and that pvp number becomes a lot closer.

[zoomgpally]

raid boss 4 hours srsly, maybe in the first week when none know the tactics??? Do u take in account how many players go through LFR system where u clear everything in 40-60 mins max.

do u take in to account that every one levels through dungeons, lasting 10-15 mins...

and an average game in 2s is way longer than 5 mins, have u ever played healer//dps vf healer//dps lol

All your assumptions are based on random fabricated numbers



currently farming AB rep 8-12 bg every night, I can rarely see any bots, so again 75% totally exaggerated and fabricated number.

Bottom line, both PVP and PVE have high representation among the player pool, based on blizzard stats, and to diminish or full out ignore the importance and representation of each one of them is simply fullish and naive.

He said "raid", not "raid boss"

Also, its a long time since i've seen a LFR without at least 60 minutes of waiting for tanks/healers, always somebody leaving after first boss.

[Nyaldee]

Well PvE is pretty developed and multilayered, always watched by Blizz and when something's obviously wrong hotfixes come nearly instantly. PvP wise game's in a dog state - imbalances are going on for several months, fixes aren't happening often enough to achieve balanced enviroment. From ppls i pved with many are playing whille dozens of ppls i pvped with quited game (as did i recently). Given this data i simply don't understand Blizz barely doing anything for pvp, even thought it takes way less efforts then creating a huge pieces of pve content.

[Nzete]

I only wonder how deceptive those numbers are. For example does a 2v2 arena lasting 2 minutes count for the same amount on the PvP tally as a 4 hour raid night does for the PvE section? If so what does that mean for the PvP numbers coming in lower than the PvE ones? There's clearly not enough information presented to decide anything. They should have compared hours of gameplay spent in each instead of number of instances. They basically told us nothing

PvP arenas tend to be short and brutal with someone being CCed to dead and good game from there. On a raid night we run 1 raid instance (only one this tier). There are 5 raiding nights in a week. On RBGS we run around 8 in the same or less time. Arenas are much shorter than that. Our one raid has 25 people. The rbgs have 10. If they wanted to tell us something about the relative popularity of pvp instances vs. pve instances, they would have had to say "toon hours per day" where they add up 25 hours for one hour of a 25 man raid and 1 hour for a single 6 minute rated battleground.

[Madruga]

As people have already said, that is instance based and thus is pretty biased. If you think about it, the average Arena game lasts what, 5~ minutes? It also has between 4 and 6 people in (lets say the average amount is 5, although there is probably more 2s than 3s played daily). Lets say a raid lasts 4 hours, although multiple nights might be spent in the same raid instance.

So, in 4 hours, 10 people raiding has created: 1 PvE Instance

In the same 4 hours, 10 people PvPing has created: 96 PvP Instances*

Arguably, I'm making this biased because you could compare RBGs against low level dungeons... But in all honesty I think Heroics (20m) and Raids (4hrs) are probably the most popular PvE instances, while Arenas (5m) are by far the most popular PvP instance.

Obviously this is all speculation. If Isle of Conquest and Alterac Valley are the most popular PvP instances then that is 80 people in 1 instance and PvP is far more popular than any of us imagined, but only Blizzard can see the actual stats.



*In 240 minutes, with 5 minutes per arena game, 48 arena games were played. 2 sets of people queueing makes it 96.
((60[hour]*4] / 5[minutes per game]) * 2[Doubled because there is 2 sets of 5])

This is exactly what I was thinking when I saw the statistics. PVP games tend to be much faster than PVE instances. And there is the question on how they are counting raids... You get 1 lockout for week, so you would have 25 people spendings 20 hours in just 1 instance in that week. In the same 20 hours, these 25 people would be able to do around 500 PVP instances (using the math from the post I quoted).

Still, it is pretty impressive. WoW is still much more PVE-guided than PVP, but PVP is doing formidably. Better than I thought it was.

[meathead]

I only wonder how deceptive those numbers are. For example does a 2v2 arena lasting 2 minutes count for the same amount on the PvP tally as a 4 hour raid night does for the PvE section? If so what does that mean for the PvP numbers coming in lower than the PvE ones? There's clearly not enough information presented to decide anything. They should have compared hours of gameplay spent in each instead of number of instances. They basically told us nothing

the #'s are debatable for sure,but if i had to bet on it.i would say that more people partake in pvp then they do in pve.look at AV for example,its 40 vs 40 24/7.thats 80 players in one BG,thats far far more "4 times" the amount of people in one bg then you have in raids "20".time spent in a raid or bg,arena, should not count at all.sure you can spend 4 hours in a raid,but do not try to say for that 4 hours you are raiding/pveing the hole time.more time is wasted sitting around looking for replacements or 10 min brakes then you can shake a stick at.besides raids are supposed to take longer then a bg "old av says hi lol".

how many nights a week do you raid?how many different raids?my guess you raid a few nights a week and do 1 raid,correct?i can run bgs for one day and thats more then you can pve.how many times have you jump into a dungeon to come in at the very end,it happens alot,but that still counts right?time put in should not matter.total player #'s should and instances run.

also im willing to bet that a large chunk of the pve #'s is from raid finder.that = padded pve #'s from the "raid finder people" and we all know who usually runs in there lol. im just not seeing how 20 man raids,hell more people probable run 10 mans now adays.can have more people in them then bgs have while bgs run 24/7 365.even if u add in dungeons that 5 people,per run while bgs have no less then 10 vs 10.

that what i would like to see total #'s of people in instanced pvp compaired to people in instanced pve.liek i said i would bet on more people in pvp as a hole over pve.

i run one AV-bang thats 80 people in one bg.if i ran 1 raid max # of people would be 20-25.i then q for wsg,bang another 20 people "100" total in 2 bgs.see my point?

wow's drop in sub #'s of the years,i think the MAIN reason is the declining state of pvp,and thats been pushing a huge #'s of pvpers away.

[Knolan]

Pretty impossible to compare, the problem is that people assume that PVE is raiding that will keep 10 ~ 25 players busy for many hours per week, but that is far from the truth. For instance, nearly everyone who plays PVE has done the single scenarios from IoT... they are a single player PVE instance, and is mandatory for the legendary cloak. There is also the heroic scenarios which are an easy and, at least in my guild, popular way to cap valor. If you have high ilvl, you can clear a scenario in about 10 minutes. Finally, there are old content raids/dungeons for transmog/mounts, which are decently popular. Someone hunting the molten core mount can probably spawn 6 ~ 8 instances per hour.

[Deleted]

I'd be more interested in them releasing just the instance number for end game. Leveling an alt I do hundreds of PVE instances, and 1 PvP instance where I realize its completely retarded and a waste of time.

Remove the low level pve instances and that pvp number becomes a lot closer.

Pretty much this.

It seems like the mop changes really boosted the bg-part of PvP. Too bad things are allways grim for the 2k+ 3s playerbase

[Prag]

There's no real way to segregate the number of majority-bot BG's just like there's no way to segregate the LFR runs where 75% of the DPS are AFK, or the Raids where players are carried (and likewise AFK/dead).

The people saying that the numbers are pointless are right. You either enjoy it enough to continue or you don't. Even if the numbers were perfect, absent any flaws and showed that PvP > PvE would that have changed your opinion?

[ophion1990]

PvP numbers are fairly inflated due to the nature of the content. Few people spam 5man dungeons anymore, which means that a lot of the PvE numbers come from more time-intensive stuff. Raids.

PvP, on the other hand, continues to be about short commitments. BGs, and especially arenas are spammed to a much greater degree than raids are.

I'm not saying PvP isn't popular or anything, just... Maybe take the numbers with a grain of salt.

Scenarios seem fairly popular and barely take up any time either though. They don't last nearly as long as any BG would (unless 1 team dominates). I completly agree with the grain of salt bit though. Out of those 900k instances, how many of them would be level 90s farming lower level content for a mount or w/e (since it isn't really clarified that it's just max level PvE content).

Anyway, people who throw out the "WoW is a PvE game" crap are delusional, I didn't need some random statictic to tell me that.

[Mormolyce]

Mmm, PVP instances on average take less time than PVE so you can queue for a lot more of them. Doesn't really accurately represent participation, a better figure would be the number of unique players queueing for each.

I mean by comparison, pet battles blow both of them out of the water. There's more than double as many pet battles per day as PVE and PVP instances COMBINED. But is participation in pet battles that much higher? No it's just that pet battles are really fast so you do a lot more individual battles.

- - - Updated - - -

I'd be more interested in them releasing just the instance number for end game. Leveling an alt I do hundreds of PVE instances, and 1 PvP instance where I realize its completely retarded and a waste of time.

Remove the low level pve instances and that pvp number becomes a lot closer.

I have no numbers to back me up but I strongly suspect that at this point the percentage of the playerbase that is leveling versus at level 90 is so small that it wouldn't affect the overall ratio of PVE to PVP instances very much.

[Bluesftw]

cant really compare pvp v pve that way, 25 people doing raid for like 2h counts as one instance creation, same 25 people doing arenas for 2h would create like hundrets of pvp instances

[ro9ue]

Keep in mind 1 3minute 2v2 Arena match holding 4 players can count towards a PVP instance. (And Blizzard has stated 2v2 is the most popular). Where a PVE LFR instance holds 25 people and lasts much, much longer.

[Schwert]

Until we see the numbers of 2k+ arenas (3's and 5's) and RBG participation I'd wager that most of the numbers from the PvP portion are from random battlegrounds and people capping in 2's.
The 2k+ matches also match up well to normal/heroic raiding.

Separate numbers could be used to compare LFR/5 mans to Random BG's and sub 1750/Randoms.

Most people who PvP in this game now days I've met just stick to the battlegrounds now.

I don't think it's possible to draw the popularity of PvP off this - especially with that pet battle counter right near it.